The proposed research examines adaptive cognition in adulthood in the way an individual interprets problem situations, i.e., causal attributions. Research in the first award period demonstrated that older adults made more interactive attributions (multiple factors) as well as more dispositional attributions (e.g., blamed the main character) than younger adults, in negative relationship situations. The oldest adults and adolescents also produced less dialectical thinking. The proposed research will attempt to explain these findings using a social cognitive framework. In order to understand mechanisms involved in attributional processing, age/cohort differences in a priori schemas reflecting values, attitudes, and beliefs and the degree to which relationship and achievement situations evoke schematic processing will be assessed. It is expected that increasing age, experience, and changing social roles and life circumstances will impact the accessibility of such social schemas, and thus, influence the type of attributions made. In addition, individual differences in beliefs, styles, and schematicity will be related to differences in attributions. In this way developmental changes in attributions can be clarified by understanding individual differences in relevant variables. Five studies will assess schematicity and attributional processes of early adolescents (ages 13-15), adolescents (ages 16-l9), youths, three mature adult groups (ages 30-59), young~ld (ages 6O-68), and old-old (ages 70-79) using varying samples. Studies I and 2 will examine age/cohort difference in schematicity for the attribution vignettes using both a free generation task for relevant schemas and a priming procedure assessing attitudes that are evoked automatically and nonconsciously. Study 3 will examine the relationship between schematicity and causal attributional reasoning in relationship and achievement situations. Study 4 will link developmentally- related variables (e.g., ego level), invariant response styles (e.g., intolerance for ambiguity), psychometric intelligence, and schematicity to differences in causal reasoning (Study 4). Finally, Study 5 will examine the relationship between causal attributional reasoning and emotional saliency of the situation. The immediate aim of this 4-year project is to examine attributional reasoning in relationship and achievement situations in relation to cohort- related experience (e.g., schematicity), individual differences measures, and emotional saliency. The long-term perspective yields ways of assessing dysfunctional attributions in relationship situations as well as implications for adaptive coping in adulthood.